Sorry, Villeroy, this did not seem to work but thanks for the help. Let me be a little more specific. I would like to filter out any value that starts with an asterisk in a text field called Name in table Data. SQL looks like this:

SELECT 'Name' FROM 'Data' WHERE 'Name' not like {escape '*'} || %

This results in "Syntax error in SQL expression".

I have also tried:SELECT `Name` FROM `Data` WHERE `Name` not like {escape '*'}

and got another "Syntax error in SQL expression".

I am of the understanding that the || is to concatenate and the % is to represent anything that may follow the *. I could not find LOCATE in help so I am assuming it is not available to me.

Note that both the database table names and column names are surrounded by double quotes ( " ) while text strings are surrounded by single quotes ( ' )

In the first Query, the ESCAPE character, an asterisk, is defined by including the word ESCAPE as a text string and it is defined as '\*' . . . and . . . in the NOT LIKE portion, it is coded as: '\*%' .

In the second Query, it just gets a substring using the function SUBSTR starting at the first character for a length of 1, and, have it return all records where it does NOT ( <> ) start with '*' .

I hope this helps, please be sure to let me / us know.

Sliderule

Thanks to add [Solved] in your 1st post Subject (edit button top right) if this issue has been resolved.

In the first query above, the Access function MID works just like the function I described above - SUBSTR ( Substring ) . . . so, it returns the contents of `Name` starting with the first character for a length of 1. And, the <> in words is equivalent to NOT EQUAL.

In the second query above, the Access function LEFT is used to return the FIRST leftmost character from `Name` when it is NOT EQUAL to the text string '*'

In the third query above, using NOT LIKE and in the text string - surrounded by parentheses - ('*%')

I hope this helps, please be sure to let me / us know.

Sliderule

Thanks to add [Solved] in your 1st post Subject (edit button top right) if this issue has been resolved.